Building MVP on contract

New line of work this year, with startups I have been contracting for and partnering with. I've been consulting and offering advice while building Marketable Valuable Products - MVP - getting them to the marketing and pitching round. Its been an interesting process to try and start with very little and bash it and polish it into shape for a marketing launch and pitching at events and with VC investors.

The work has concentrated on agreeing and tracking key metrics into the apps and apis as soon as possible in equal measure of importance to the app and apis themselves. Showing the growth and being able to dial into the audience is important at early stage and then into startup life.

I found advantage in using Segment.io to add the tracking and that acts as a linking funnel to the other services. Meaning I only had to add Event tracking to the site once. Not one per product. Then hooking that through to Google Analytics, Kissmetrics and Drip. It was interesting to be able to use the same tool to hook up the drip marketing as well as the analytics, and should mean they record similar numbers. I also trialed Mixpanel, Intercom and Amplitude. Amplitude being the outsider I added to check the metrics on on project and it came out with some good reports in the free base version. Less marketing focused than Kissmetrics but the reports were more shareable and the time between events per customer was helpful.

Another piece I learned that I had not had in a project before was because the product was mainly API driven so we couldn't have the JS code throughout, the user ids, did not join up when a user had signed up, as no cookie. So found there is a set of commands for looking up and linking the user ids from annon to our internal. This was a useful find or would have left a data flaw.

After delivery though it is a wait and see game as to if there will be more contract work so does have a certain different drive to be ready for a presentation with code, in a way I have done more of in a piece of marketing for a competition or promotion, visual pages. Nice to do it in a code founded angle though.

Then its on to the next consultation collaboration, and see if I could find one of these ventures early enough to partner with them.

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